Why yes, we have entered the portion of this blog where I tackle all the controversial topics back to back. And just before the fundraiser too. I always manage to offend ten or twenty people with this stuff, too. But--
But the muse wants what it wants, and this is the blog muse, so deal.
I came at this one topic via a pro-abortion (sorry, only possible characterization) tweet which blamed a mother for carrying a "defective" child to term, classifying it as "Selfishness" since the child would never have "A normal life."
I have no idea what the child's defect was honestly, but considering abortion has been recommended for everything from small-ish and overcome-able physical defects to presumed mental issues, it could be anything really.
I think everyone knows my opinion on this. Or at least my "lived opinion." As in, while I wouldn't at the time -- I was not even thirty -- have disputed the "quality of life" thing, when they assured me older son would be retarded and I needed to abort now, I told them to put it up their jumper, because after six years of infertility I was going to have whatever was in there, even if it turned out to be a cat. Because when push came to shove, his being alive trumped everything else. Now, mind, this might not be a great endorsement, since I'm famously incapable of killing even defective quail.
But when I was following the discussion about the tweet in one of my groups, the whole "Quality of life" hit me wrong.
And I'm the first person to admit it's a very difficult topic, and the shades of grey are deep enough that you don't know where plain black and white ends. But I also think the truth should be told.
Had my child turned out to be, as they said he'd be, completely non-functional and unable to live alone (Turns out they might have been right. I mean, he IS married.) would I have regretted bringing him into the world? Undoubtedly. I have had friends with children who would never be able to function independently and who, besides that, had extensive requirements merely to stay alive. It's the sort of thing that eats a good parent alive. You don't want to let the kid go to an institution that might abuse him/her. But on the other hand, your life is over the moment the child is born.
Cases like that, and your being absolutely sure early on -- and there's the rub -- I might still be unable to have an abortion, but I would not judge anyone who did. After all, particularly if there are other children involved, something like that can destroy not just a parent, but an entire family. I'd still consider it wrong, but there are wrongs you can forgive, if only because you imagine how tempted you might be, and that you might in fact succumb.
But it's not the quality of life of the child, even in those cases. Oh, it might be. The child might be miserable. But here's the thing: as someone who was a very sickly child, in and out of hospitals, and with her whole body turning into open sores on the regular for no reason anyone could determine, if you'd asked about my quality of life, I'd have been confused. Oh, not because I didn't understand the question, but because.... well? It was fine. I mean, sure, it sucked if you compared it to other kids. But I'd always been sickly. Spending enormous amount of time in bed alone (because antibiotics were new enough isolation was still common even for "just" colds) in a room without a window was just how 50% of my time was spent. I learned to have a rich life of the imagination, building lego towns and imagining people or aliens living in them and creating entire (very odd. Think of a 3 or 4 year old's understanding of the world) soap operas for such beings. Or later reading comics and day dreaming. I mean, I did enjoy those. I had a happy childhood despite the frequent illnesses. Quality of life sucked, but only compared to normal kids. I'd never been a normal kid, so how could I know?
Again what that discomfort about "Quality of life" hit me, I had to do a deep dive, because I'm notoriously reluctant to kill anything that's not attacking/hurting me. And even then, I've been known to carefully relocate biting bugs, to avoid killing them. Not a Buddhist, just cracked.
While we take pets on the final sad trip to the vet, we don't do it lightly, and probably should do it much earlier. But in their case, I actually don't do it because I'm careful to distinguish MY quality of life and theirs. I've seen too many pets killed for their owners' convenience, and while yeah, pets, not humans, it's still a life with some level of sentience, and since I can't create it, I'm careful about destroying it. Take Euclid: he was mostly incontinent and a pain to live with for the last five years of his life, but he seemed perfectly happy toddling around in a diaper and getting pets and sleeping on the sofa. It wasn't until I saw him pee in his water then drink that I realized things were really really far gone. (And even now I wonder if I just had him killed for my ew.)
But when it comes to people.... Well, it's different. Because when it comes to people, who are you to judge their quality of life? And where does that slippery slope end.
I watched a pro-euthanasia movie once, and I can't remember the name which is probably good. It had the most deceptive description which made it sound like a rom com, so Dan started watching it, and the situation was interesting enough that I started watching.
It was a woman hired to care for a young man who is paraplegic after an accident, and they fall in love. Fine. He's also a multi millionaire, so his disability is really mitigated. Money cannot give him back the ability to walk and move, but it can mitigate discomfort, hire people to help him move/fetch/carry and give him a "nurse" who really is supposed to amuse him and read to him and such.
The not at all subtle message, carried in the end, is that he chooses to die because he can't be normal, and that's the highest, most moral choice he can make.
It left me baffled and vaguely disgusted. In the way of such things, it had been established he could function as a male, and could in fact feel it. And also that the girl wanted children.
But he chooses -- note these are words put in the character's mouth by oh so compassionate writers -- death instead because he can never go to Paris and walk around as he once did. Why, people will stare at him being in a wheel chair! It's unbearable!
Watching it, and while the movie used all the soft lighting and the girl "understanding" to justify the choice, I kept getting furious.
Why is his life unendurable? Because people might stare and pity him? So he's dying for pride? Seems dumb to me.
We have someone who is wealthy beyond the dreams of most of us, who, while confined in some ways, has the means to counter his disability. He could have an adoring wife to whom he could give a very good life. He could have a passel of kids and watch them grow up and have good lives. But the movie tells us none of this is worth it because he can't be perfect, and therefore his quality of life is not worth living.
Which is always the way these things go, and Canada's MAID is set on proving it.
Look, at least the movie had the point that this was a young man who had lost what he used to have. Now in my opinion the proper treatment for that is to have psychological counseling so he sees what is still worth it about his life, but at least you can understand the shock and the outrage. Now imagine someone who's been "like that" their whole life. Sure, their "quality of life" might be bad to an outsider. But from the inside, what else have they ever known?
And that's exactly the problem. The merchants of death and despair who posit "just kill him/her/it" as fixing every ill and who claim to do it out of compassion for other's "quality of life" are not qualified to classify anyone's quality of life FROM THE OUTSIDE.
If you judge it by achievements, I've known people who were profoundly handicapped who had better and more "worthy" lives than a lot of completely "whole" people. The best student in my university graduating class (Fortunately in another major/minor, or I'd be wholly eclipsed) was a Thalidomide baby. He didn't let it slow him down, and I suspect he's now a professor or retired professor of French or Latin. Judging by the bevy of girls who helped him with everything from pushing his wheel chair to lighting his cigarette, he's also probably married and with children. These are speculation, of course, but if they didn't come true, it was by his choice. In our early twenties, he was doing very well indeed.
One of the kids' playfriends had a mother who appeared perfectly normal. Mother of 3, and a painter. I didn't even realize until we'd had a lot of contact that she had a prosthetic arm. And it wasn't until I saw her in shorts and a tiny t-shirt that I realized she also had a prosthetic leg. One of those weird things? Apparently the umbilical cord had wrapped around the limbs and effectively killed them? Or at least that's what I remember from what I was told. If that's impossible, it's still close to what I was told. Normal genes, just didn't develop right. She was close to fifteen years younger than I, so there's a good chance the mother knew in advance, but chose not to abort. Or maybe it was too early to know. But in the end, does it matter? Yes, she had the problem of getting, maintaining, using prosthetics. But she was a happy woman, leading a full life.
And all of us know dozens of these examples. Including people who made significant contributions to science and tech.
Should they never have existed, or have been killed early? Who are we to say? Sure, their lives look difficult to us, but hear me out here: They're the only lives they had and will ever have. And some of them are demonstrably quite happy and productive.
Meanwhile how many people with all limbs and tested high IQs do absolutely nothing with their lives or, worse, are drains on everyone else's resources, because they're always depressed, or broke, or simply unable to get themselves to some sort of semblance of functioning, let alone happiness?
Which frankly is why pre-birth or after birth euthanasia, while it might start from the highest principles or at least a justifiable sense of compassion (most often for the parents and family, not the person, but still justifiable) always ends in eugenics. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
It might start with "This person will suffer their entire lives and die young" but it always ends in "Lives unworthy of living."
And the reasons the lives are unworthy always ends up more and more tenuous, until in the end you're killing people for being goofy, or depressed, or having no financial sense.
In its most poisonous version, it convinces the person themselves of it. It convinces them to compare themselves to a platonic ideal of themselves, and feel unhappy with everything they are and have achieved, because they don't have this one thing.
So we get to: "I am sometimes sad, therefore I should die, because that's terrible." Or "I am poor and can't enjoy the good things in life, therefore it's best I should die."
It might sound like I'm exaggerating wildly, but I've seen similar cases reported for Canada and -- I think -- Holland (Though it might be Belgium.)
What it amounts to, even when it's "assisted suicide" (Let's talk about the influence of doctors over those who are sick or even "merely" depressed, shall we?) and much more so when it's euthanasia, is people looking from the outside and deciding that if they were the other person they'd be unhappy, so the other person should die.
Following the reasoning of euthanasia, I should be put out of my misery, because at almost 40 books, I still haven't had a world-shattering bestseller. Even if I rather enjoy my writing, as do other people, at least occasionally.
The problem with judging if your life is "worthy of living" is that it always ends up being judging what you have and what you are against some imaginary "Perfect."
The perfect is the enemy of the good, and even the most hale, fit and brilliant among us, always fall far short of perfect (being human.)
Which means seen and judged from the outside, the perfect is the enemy of all life.
And in the end the perfection the merchants of death would achieve is the clean perfection of a rock, scrubbed clean of all life, rolling through the loneliness of space forever.
World without end.
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